The Bride’s House

by Sandra Dallas

  Charlie, it does not sit easy with me that we deceived Pearl. She believes me and her have pulled the wool over your eyes, and she’s made me promise a dozen times never to tell you why we took this trip. It would kill her to find out you know about her off-child. She thinks I wrote she had the influenza, and the doctor ordered bed rest, and that’s why we’re staying here such a long time. When I told you in Georgetown, I did not know what else to do. The poor girl was so upset I feared she’d throw herself in Clear Creek. You asked me when it happened, and I said I did not know. But now, I believe it must have been in Denver the day they visited the capitol. Maybe he took her back to his lodgings. I remember she was awful flustered that evening.

  She does not ask about the baby, but she has always been one to keep her feelings to herself. She is all right in body, but she grieves bad. I don’t know if she yet pines for Mr. Curry. She doesn’t talk to me about him, except to ask one time if she should have informed him of her condition. I said she should not, although I am not so sure now. I ought to have told Mr. Curry myself, and it worries me plenty that I did not. I know you wouldn’t have liked it, would have fired me for it, but it bothers me. I could have given them the chance to be together, but I held my tongue. It wasn’t right that Mr. Curry didn’t have a say. It’s not good keeping secrets.

  Like I say, I don’t know if I did the right thing telling you either. It brings to mind me giving you that letter Nealie wrote on her deathbed to Will Spaulding. I’ve turned it over in my mind all these years whether I ought to have mailed it to him. Maybe I should have read it first. But that’s done, and maybe it’s best you burned it. We have enough deceit now that I won’t worry about the past.

  Lydia Travers

  P.S. You can make your plans to join us now.

  Susan sat back in her chair, her heart beating hard, her throat dry. Her mother had had an illegitimate baby, a child born twenty years before Susan. Like Susan, her mother had been pregnant and unmarried. She set the sheet of paper on the table and picked up her coffee cup, but her hand shook so that she returned it to the desk without drinking. She stood and went to the long front window, looking out, but she could not see her mother. How many times had Pearl stood in that very spot, staring at the same mountain, thinking about her first daughter? And then Susan thought about herself. What would she feel if she gave up a daughter? Would she ever get over it? How could she?

  Agitated, Susan walked around the room, touching the spot where the strongbox had been hidden, depressing keys on the piano, then playing a chord with one hand, picking a withered leaf off a flower stalk that sat in a vase. She went to the window a second time, but Pearl had not returned. Abruptly, Susan grabbed her coat and went out. The sun had touched the snow on top of Sunrise Peak, but Susan didn’t notice the mountain as she walked into a wind that blew dirt and dead leaves down the street, until she reached the park and found Pearl huddled on the steps of the bandstand. Susan sat down beside her, and in a moment, Pearl reached out her hand and clutched Susan’s.

  “How could you give her up, my sister—Faith?” Susan swallowed when she said the words.

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  Pearl shook her head. Her scarf had come undone, and she retied it. “Your father didn’t know, of course, not then. I told him on our drive to Denver, just before we married. He hired a detective in Paris, but the home I’d gone to had been torn down, and there had been the war.”

  “How awful, Mother.”

  “The worst part was giving her up, then wondering all those years whether she was still alive. During the last war, I was afraid she’d fallen into the hands of the Nazis somehow or had starved. I guess we’ll never know.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Susan put her arms around herself to keep out the cold wind. Then she gave a short laugh. “We’re a fine family of women, aren’t we, every one of us pregnant and not married.”

  Pearl smiled. “I’d thought of that irony.” She stretched out her legs. “My mother married a man she didn’t love so that she could keep her baby. I gave mine up, and I’ve regretted it ever since. And I wasn’t fair to your father. I should have told him. I had you read those things so you’d know we understand, my mother and I. Maybe we can help you decide what to do.”

  “The only choice I have is between giving up the baby and tricking Joe into marrying me, and both of them stink.”

  “There’s another,” Pearl said.

  Susan frowned at her mother.

  “You could let Joe decide,” she said softly.

  “You mean tell him and see if he still wants to marry me? Who would do that?”

  “Your grandfather.”

  “Well, Joe isn’t Charlie Dumas.”

  “You’ll never know if you don’t tell him.”

  “I can’t, Mother. I’d be too ashamed.”

  Pearl stood then and drew her coat around her. “You have a few days to decide. It’s cold out here. I don’t want you to get chilled.” She held out her hand to Susan, and the two walked back toward the Bride’s House holding hands.

  * * *

  Susan refused to see Joe after that. When he phoned, Susan said she had the flu. He stopped by the house, but her mother told him Susan was in bed, which was true. She barely left her room, spending her days crying and looking into the mirror, wondering how she could have made such a mess of her life. Joe brought a bouquet of purple asters he’d picked in the mountains, but Susan still wouldn’t see him.

  “You can’t hide forever,” Pearl told her daughter.

  “I can’t face him.”

  “You have to, Susan. It’s not right. You’re treating him shabbily. He deserves better. You haven’t much time now.”

  Susan nodded slowly. “I know.” She was sitting in the dining room in her bathrobe, looking through the shutters at the gray day. Although it was still August, snow had fallen on the high peaks, and the wind that blew down from them brought a chill. The house was cold, and despite the heavy bathrobe, Susan couldn’t get warm. She nibbled at an apple, but she wasn’t hungry and put it down. As Susan sat there, miserable, trying to decide what to do, the doorbell rang, and Pearl answered it. “Yes, Joe, she’s up.” And in a second, Joe was standing in the doorway.

  “Hey, how are you doing?”

  “About as lousy as I look.” Susan’s hair was uncombed, and her eyes were red.

  “You don’t look that bad to me. I thought maybe fresh air would do you some good. Why don’t we go for a walk?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Getting out of the house would be the best thing for you, Susan,” Pearl said. “You get dressed, and I’ll entertain Joe for a few minutes.” Susan shot her mother an angry look, but Pearl insisted. “Go on.”

  Her mother was right, Susan thought. She might as well get it over with. So she went upstairs and washed her face and combed her hair, then put on a heavy white wool sweater and jeans. The jeans were already tight.

  “You look even better,” Joe said, when Susan returned. He took her hand, and they went out onto the porch and down the steps, Pearl watching from the doorway. They didn’t talk as they made their way down Taos Street and into the park. Susan sat down on the steps of the bandstand, while Joe leaned on a rail beside her. “I’ve been doing some thinking,” he began, and Susan wondered if he knew somehow, if he would be the one to break their engagement. She was relieved. He’d say he’d changed his mind, and she wouldn’t have to tell him about the baby, and she would be gracious, saying she understood.

  She closed her eyes and waited, and when he didn’t continue, she asked, “About what?”

  “Getting married.” Susan took a deep breath, but before she could reply, Joe continued. “I’ve been wondering why we should wait until Christmas. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not have a big wedding. Heck, I’d elope, but you probably wouldn’t like that. So I was thinking we could get married at your house when your father gets he
re next week, and then we could go to California while I finish my senior year. What do you think?”

  Susan didn’t answer. She stared across the dead grass in the park. A few aspen leaves had turned yellow and had blown into the corners of the bandstand. It could work, she thought. She wasn’t that far along, and Joe might wonder, but there were plenty of babies born at seven months, and he’d never know for sure that the child wasn’t his. Joe and Peter resembled each other, so the baby might look like Joe. Even if Joe found out later, he’d have to accept the child. He couldn’t divorce her, because a divorced politician had no future. She weighed all that in her mind, and then she turned to Joe. “I can’t.”

  Joe looked crestfallen. “You don’t want to marry me.” It was a statement instead of a question. He turned away, sadness on his face.

  She wasn’t being fair, Susan thought. It wasn’t right to let him think she didn’t want him, and so she said, “I can’t marry you because I’m pregnant with Peter Fanshaw’s baby.”

  At first Joe just stared out across the rooftops to Sunrise Peak, and then he turned to her and said slowly, “And you can’t marry him because he’s dead.”

  Had she let him know that Peter had been killed? Susan couldn’t remember. He’d probably read her mother’s column. Everybody had.

  “Your mother told me about him,” Joe said. “And about the baby.”

  “My mother told you! She had no right!”

  “She knew that. She said it was an awful betrayal and that you might never forgive her. Then she told me she wished someone had betrayed her like that. If that had happened to her, your mom said, her life would have been so much richer. I’m not sure what she was talking about.” He shook his head, then grew serious again. “Your mother said that no matter how wrong it was of her to tell me, she wanted to give me a chance.”

  “A chance?”

  “To marry you anyway.”

  “Even though the baby’s not yours?”

  Joe nodded.

  “And you’d still marry me?” What Joe said didn’t make sense. “Why?”

  “Because I’ve never loved anybody but you, and your mother said you felt the same about me.” Joe sat down beside her and took her hands. “When she told me, I, well, I have to say I didn’t take it very well. I was hurt. But I thought it over, and I don’t want to give you up. I got to thinking that you have to deal with the surprises in your life, with the things you don’t plan, and make the best of them. You know, like the note Peggy put on your car. I hadn’t planned to ask you to marry me that night, but that note made it seem like just the right time. And it was.” He smiled and added, “Peggy told me later on what she’d done, as if that meant our engagement didn’t count.” He grew serious again. “I figured the baby was just a bonus. Somebody has to give that kid a home. You’re its mother. And I’d sure like the chance to be its father.”

  “But don’t you want—” Susan stopped when Joe put his hand over her mouth. Then he brushed the back of his hand across her cheek.

  “From now on, this is my child, too. Someday, maybe you’ll want to tell it about its father, but we don’t have to talk about that now.” He stroked her cheek. “Let’s talk about the wedding instead. So how about us getting married next week?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Good going.”

  * * *

  Joe left Susan at the Bride’s House just as Bert Joy pulled up. “Your mama called me to do some work,” he said.

  “I think maybe she wants you to paper over the wall in the study.”

  “Oh, that again. Okay, then.” He followed Susan into the house, where Pearl waited with a roll of wallpaper in her hands. “What’ve you got there?”

  “Wallpaper. You’ve done this before, Bert,” she said. “I want you to put that strongbox back inside the wall and paper it over.”

  “Why don’t you folks just get a safe-deposit box?”

  “Tradition,” Pearl told him.

  Bert headed for the study, and Pearl turned to Susan. “You’re looking a little better.” She searched her daughter’s face.

  “A lot better. Joe and I are getting married next week, as soon as Father arrives.” Susan closed her eyes, and tears seeped from under her lids. “It’s going to be all right.”

  They heard Bert whistling in the next room, and Pearl said, “I think maybe there’s something you might want to add to that box then, before it goes back into its hiding place, something you might want your own daughter to discover one day.”

  “You think the baby’s going to be a girl?”

  “There’s a fifty percent chance,” her mother replied.

  Susan laughed for the first time in a long while. “There’s nothing for me to add. I threw away the note I wrote to Joe.”

  Pearl removed a paper from the pocket of her apron. It was wrinkled, and she ironed it with her hand. “It’s up to you.”

  Her eyes clouded, Susan stared at the paper. “This is a house of secrets. I suppose one more won’t hurt. Maybe one day, I will tell my child—my daughter—about her father.”

  “And right the wrongs of the past?” her mother asked.

  “Were they wrongs? Or were they only secrets?” Susan pondered that for a moment with no answer. Then she picked up the note, went into the study, and laid it inside the strongbox, adding her story to those of her mother and her grandmother. Placing the note there gave her a continuity with the two women who had shared both her shame and her joy.

  Bert Joy tapped the box into place, then he cut a square of wallpaper and swiped it with paste, fitting it over the box so neatly that the women had to look closely to see the patch. “Okay, then,” Bert said to himself as he picked up his tools.

  Susan walked him to the door and watched him get into his truck. She stayed on the porch, staring out at the mountains, which were obscured by clouds. Sealing up her secret with those of her mother and grandmother was a way of putting the past behind her. Now, she could think about the future, a future with Joe Bullock and her baby—their baby. The clouds drifted away then, and a ray of sun penetrated, touching the tower of the Bride’s House—her house, hers and Joe’s, because no matter where their lives took them, this would be their home, this house that had sheltered three generations of women of her family, this house where she would be married.

  She breathed in the cold mountain air, catching the scent of the wet pines, and although she knew it was late for their blooming, Susan thought she could smell Nealie’s lilacs, too.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There really is a Bride’s House. It may not be as magnificent as the one I wrote about in The Bride’s House, but it is an elegant place, one of the finest homes in Georgetown, Colorado, when lumberman Charles Bullock built it in 1881. But when I entered it 125 years later, the house was a derelict, its paint scoured off by the wind and snow, old cars parked in the yard. The inside had been stripped of its charm, the parlors and foyer turned into a single room, a part of an old house propped up against one side to serve as a bedroom. Raccoons lived in the tower.

  My husband, Bob, and I toured the house one summer afternoon in 2007 with preservation architects Kathy Hoeft and Gary Long, who saw beyond the grime and destruction to what the original house had been—and could be again. When he glimpsed the walnut staircase, Gary raised his arms and exclaimed, “It’s a bride’s house!” At that moment, Bob decided to buy the place. I decided to write a book about it.

  I am grateful to so many people who undertook the three-year challenge of returning the Bullock House to its nineteenth-century splendor. Thanks to Don Buckley for entrusting us with his family home. Kathy Hoeft lovingly restored the house’s Victorian integrity while meeting our own needs. Dave Grasso and Ann Sill oversaw the rebirth of the Bullock House, working with two dozen other craftsmen, including Art Boscamp, Mark Ackerman, Patrick McKendry, and Gene Rakosnik. Elaine St. Louis selected the colors and decorated the interior, giving the house warmth and personality. Landscapers Bryan Lee
and Jennifer Klaetsch replaced weeds and junked cars with a Victorian lawn and garden. You people are artists, and your work will stand for another 125 years.

  While I knew that restoration of our Bride’s House would take years to complete, I expected The Bride’s House to go much faster. No such luck! The book, too, took three years, and I would have dropped the project if it hadn’t been for the literary craftsmen who are my lifeline—Danielle Egan-Miller and Joanna MacKenzie, my loyal and supportive agents at Browne & Miller Literary Associates, who talked me through draft after draft, and Jen Enderlin, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, whose unerring instincts always make my work better. Buff Rutherford shared a lifetime of Georgetown stories, including the ones about the tire and the snake. Happy trails, Buff. Bruce Harlow answered a barrage of questions about the Air Force, Korea, and the 1950s, and Arnie Grossman gave unwavering support, as he always does. Thanks to both of you for fifty years of friendship.

  My love to Bob, for embarking with me on this remarkable venture, and to our children, Dana, Kendal, and Lloyd, and our grandson, Forrest. The Bride’s House, whether you like it or not, is your legacy.

  ALSO BY SANDRA DALLAS

  Whiter Than Snow

  Prayers for Sale

  Tallgrass

  New Mercies

  The Chili Queen

  Alice’s Tulips